West Coast 2018

£460 raised for Julia’s House so far. Thank you to all who have sponsored me - I am sure this money will help to make a massive difference to the short lives of those children and their families at Julia’s House. 60 miles - A perfect day! After a hard couple of days we thought we’d take it a bit easier today. Set off as usual at about 8am – it was freezing cold. Probably the coldest night so far, but as we got going the sun came out. We found our way to glass beach – famous for having glass that has been smoothed by the sea over the years. Unfortunately the tide was in – so we didn’t see the sea glass but the views were splendid nonetheless. Then came out treat for doing so well yesterday – we stopped at McDonald’s (after only 8 miles!) for one of their breakfast meals (empty calories but once in a while…). We are now following route 1. Unlike the 101 it isn’t a highway (like a trunk road in the UK) rather like a larger B road in the UK. The upside is there is not a huge ...

Day 15 85 miles and 1,750m climbed! That’s over a mile vertically up…. This was the day we climbed the highest point of the western seaboard – leggett Hill. At approx 1,800’ it’s not that high, but it felt it, and getting to the bottom of the big climb involved many small climbs. We started out reasonably early at 7.45am and made it to what we had hoped would be our breakfast stop after 23 miles (a fair proportion of it uphill), only to find it shut. With no alternative we continued on and found a likely café at about 30 miles – they provided us with a hot dog and crisps, which kept us going until we arrived at Leggett – a tiny place where the highway 101 and route 1 split. Route 1 heads to the coast via an epic climb (our route) whilst the 101 stays inland. By this time we were fully roasted – the sun was baking hot and we had been out in the worst of it for hours. We set ourselves up with cold drinks ice creams and fruit then set off up the highest point in the route. As it h...

78 miles and nearly 1,000m climbed – and halfway on our journey reached! What a difference the combination of good weather and beautiful scenery in quiet roads makes! The first few miles went quickly, speeding along the101 (well we might have got to 16mph). We duly had our Eureka moment: And shortly afterwards at Fernbridge we celebrated (with our usual ridiculously large breakfast) getting to our halfway point – we are now closer to Mexico than Canada. A few miles past Fernbridge we passed through a beautiful town called Ferndale. I didn’t take a photo because we knew I wouldn’t do it justice but it was exactly as you would imagine a Victorian American town to look like. It’s the sort of place that we (foreigners) would expect all US towns to look like in the same way that all visitors to the UK would expect every English town to look like Chester. 15 miles along the road we came to a town called Rio Dell which was having its fair – an obvious highlight of which was ...